Latest Forum Topics / User Research/Opinions | Post Reply |
%%%% WORLD ECONOMIC SUMMIT %%%%
|
|||||
niuyear
Supreme |
11-Sep-2010 11:31
|
||||
x 0
x 0 Alert Admin |
Our government's economic point of view : You dont produce good engough result, nothing for you. As godd as a father telling his son : Results and Report Book dont lie, you dont put in efforts, you get poor result, you wont get rewarded. |
||||
Useful To Me Not Useful To Me | |||||
niuyear
Supreme |
11-Sep-2010 11:28
|
||||
x 0
x 0 Alert Admin |
If China is ruled by singapore leaders, it will fly! In Singapore, our economy is driven by 'Productivity' , not productive, no Pay Increment even though our GDP is growing.
|
||||
Useful To Me Not Useful To Me | |||||
|
|||||
pharoah88
Supreme |
10-Sep-2010 14:17
|
||||
x 0
x 0 Alert Admin |
China ‘sweet spot’ is returning Stephen Green To understand what is going on with China’s economy, just look at wheel loaders.
Roaming Bears In April, the State Council launched a spectacular attack on real-estate speculation.
Steel prices fell, China-related equities sold off, and we even saw some hedge funds take aggressive short yuan positions in the non-deliverable forward space.
The China bears were roaming.
Now there are indications the economy has come out of this four-month policy induced slide. Apart from those wheel loader sales, the Purchasing Managers’ Index stood at a seasonally adjusted 53.4 last month, steady on the previous month, according to Standard Chartered estimates.
New orders reached 56.4, suggesting there is more growth to come.
Other signs of renewed dynamism include upticks in apartment and car sales.
Floor space sold in 11 smaller cities is almost back to levels seen before the April measures.
The bears will cry that this is the calm before the storm.
We know a wave of new apartments will hit the market this month to next month. This will trigger price declines as developers compete to shift inventory.
Property investment, making up about a third of all investment, should then slow. US slowdown At the same time, the recovery in the United States is probably over.
Standard Chartered predicts the US economy will grow only 0.5 per cent in the fourth quarter and in the first three months of next year. China will struggle to boost its exports to North America in this period by more than 3 per cent.
This will, of course, drag on China’s growth. But with momentum looking healthy, there is no reason for major concern.
There are some who still anticipate accelerating inflation. Yet manufactured good prices are under control, while the cost of meat and oil is stable even though grain prices have soared.
As long as inflation is contained, the Chinese government may loosen policy by year’s end and approve more infrastructure projects. It will probably allow the banks to lend more freely.
Bumper fiscal revenue piled up in the Finance Ministry’s bank account in the first half and is crying out to be spent, possibly on low-income housing, education and health care.
Assuming that apartment prices drop in the next two months, the ministry could also afford to loosen its housing measures a bit.
In short, we may well be in for a miniature re-run of the fourth quarter of 2008.
Back then, a collapsing US economy sent panic through most markets. The only dynamic place in the world with the policy dial turned towards stimulus was China.
Investors are presented with a call:
Will the negative fallout from a decelerating US wipe out all risk appetite?
Or will investors bet again that there is enough right with China to support higher valuations on the commodities the nation consumes and on the companies operating there?
With the Federal Reserve on hold and probably introducing more quantitative easing, it won’t take much to push money in this direction.
If this is the case, China will soon hit another of its sweet spots, with an economy that is neither too hot nor too cold.
They don’t come along too often these days, so don’t let it go to waste. Bloomberg Stephen Green is the head of China research at Standard Chartered in Shanghai. The opinions expressed are his own. They are tractors with a big shovel on the front to pick up and move earth or coal. Such machines are used to build roads and railways or to dig black stuff out of shallow mines. China is, as we all know, an investment-heavy economy, so wheel-loader sales are a pretty good leading indicator: Companies only buy them if they plan to use one over the next 24 months. In July, 15,823 new loaders rolled out of the showrooms. That represented a 50-percent increase in seasonally adjusted sales compared with a year earlier. This is hardly the kind of number that one would expect from an economy on the verge of collapse. Instead it is only one of many signs that Chinese gross domestic product is steadily expanding while inflationary pressures have moderated. In short, figures for last month may well be what we have all been waiting for: A China sweet spot. This year, officials in Beijing have been trying to cool an over-stimulated economy. And from March through June, it looked like the government was achieving just that. The bureaucrats approved fewer new infrastructure projects. The banks were given loan quotas and told that all the loans they had extended last year were, yes, actually meant to be paid back. |
||||
Useful To Me Not Useful To Me | |||||
pharoah88
Supreme |
10-Sep-2010 13:34
|
||||
x 0
x 0 Alert Admin |
Russian opportunity for Singapore Jo-ann Huang joannhuang@mediacorp.com.sg SINGAPORE That is up by 50 per cent on-year and both sides want to strengthen business links further. The Russian-Singapore Business Forum on Sept 26 to 29 is expected to focus on investment opportunities in the state of Tatarstan, which is a two-and-half-hour flight from Moscow. The oil-rich Tatarstan city of Kazan, with a population of 1.2 million, has a burgeoning middle-class but is lacking in hospitality, health care and education services. And one local company, Sourcelink, aims to help transform Kazan into a medical tourism hub. It is building a US$150 million ($201 million) mixed-development medical facility there that it is slated for completion in two-and-a-half years. Sourcelink has been operating in Russia for four years and is well established in Vladivostok, in far eastern Russia. The forum organisers say Tatarstan’s business-friendly policies and lower costs compared to more established Russian cities should attract more Singapore companies. Still, foreign investors face some challenges. “One of Russia’s problems is red tape and bureaucracy. If a region can offer to cut some of these for foreign investors, I think that is a great opportunity,” said Mr Michael Tay, executive director of the Russia-Singapore Business Forum. — Despite uncertainties in the global economy, Singapore’s bilateral trade with Russia hit some $3 billion in the first half of this year. |
||||
Useful To Me Not Useful To Me | |||||
pharoah88
Supreme |
10-Sep-2010 13:07
|
||||
x 0
x 0 Alert Admin |
Sharp 14% drop in US trade deficit in July WASHINGTON The Commerce Department said yesterday the July deficit fell 14 per cent to US$42.8 billion ($57.4 billion), much lower than economists’ consensus forecast of US$47.3 billion. The lower trade deficit should give a boost to overall economic growth, analysts said. Exports rose 1.8 per cent to US$153.3 billion, the best showing since August 2008, as sales of jetliners, industrial machinery, computers and telecommunication equipment posted large gains. Imports, which had been surging, dropped 2.1 per cent to US$196.1 billion. Shipments abroad will probably remain a source of strength for US manufacturers as the world’s largest economy tries to sustain a recovery from the worst recession since the 1930s. Demand for overseas products may cool further as American consumers and businesses curb spending in coming months. “The US still has a decent export market and that’s providing a cushion for the US manufacturing industry,” said Mr David Sloan, an economist at 4Cast in New York. The trade figures are “good for the third-quarter GDP outlook”, he added. — The United States trade deficit narrowed significantly last month as exports climbed to the highest level in nearly two years, reflecting big gains in sales of American-made aircraft and other manufactured goods as imports declined.Agencies |
||||
Useful To Me Not Useful To Me | |||||
|
|||||
pharoah88
Supreme |
09-Sep-2010 21:28
|
||||
x 0
x 0 Alert Admin |
today Wednesday July 21, 2010 14 Celebrate, don’t fear, diversity Eugene K B Tan Go beyond the rituals of remembering riots and conflict this Racial Harmony Day Racial Harmony Day is celebrated in our national schools today. Launched in 1997, the day is part of the National Education programme and marks the anniversary of one of Singapore’s worst communal riots that occurred on July 21, 1964. This year also marks the 60th anniversary of the Maria Hertogh riots that took place in December 1950.
AVOID CLASHING MESSAGES We also need to ensure that there is no cognitive dissonance between what young Singaporeans are taught in school and what they observe outside of school. Otherwise, the message of diversity and community rings hollow. In short, Government policies must be congruent with efforts at social cohesion.
Given our diversity, the occasional disagreements between different groups is only to be expected.
Harmony does not mean the absence of differences or disagreements.
Neither is it about the enforcement of uniformity in the interest of harmony.
However, should we continue to assert our sectarian identities and values at the expense of our overarching civic and primary identity as Singaporeans, then we would be sleepwalking to a dangerous future.
For instance, can we transcend our apparent inclination to vote along racial lines? (If so, we can do away with the Group Representation Constituency electoral mechanism.) What about our preference to reside in apartment blocks and precincts where our individual race is in the majority? (This has required the imposition of quotas in public housing to avoid racial enclaves.)
Or the preference of disadvantaged Singaporeans to seek help primarily through their ethnic self-help groups?
The significance of ethnic markers such as race, language and religion in our society is unlikely to disappear. Erasing our primordial identities is more a utopian hope than a realistic goal. Even then, can we make their significance less prominent than what it is today, and instead emphasise our commonality?
As our society becomes more complex through immigration, intermarriages, international marriages and changing demographics, we must be accustomed to the reality that we all have multiple identities.
As it is, a person can be a Singaporean and a Malay or Chinese or Indian. These identities are complementary and not mutually exclusive. “Us” and “them” are artificial boundaries that are, in truth, indistinguishable.
Greater effort should be devoted to strengthening the Singaporean- Singapore identity. The maturing of this civic identity can help reduce the countervailing pulls of race, language and religion.
The existential threat to Singapore is not disharmony per se, but the mindless knee-jerk reactions to isolated incidents of disharmony.
Racial Harmony Day has a role to play in building up confidence and our stock of social capital to withstand threats to our social fabric.
But it must go beyond a superficial treatment of diversity, and instead, intelligently engage students such that they imbibe the values that sustain our multiracialism.
This reinforced commitment to go beyond a prism of fear would represent a more nuanced understanding and deeper appreciation of our society. The writer is assistant professor of law at the School of Law, Singapore Management University. Today, students will attend school dressed in their traditional costumes and be treated to a buffet of local foods and cultural performances. This rendition of diversity through food, fashion and festivals offers them a sensory exposure to our rich heritage and inherent diversity. Yet, amid the celebration of our diversity, there will also be reminders — through the reenactments of conflict and riots — of race and religion as abiding fault-lines in our society. The official discourse of the July 21, 1964 riots will be repeated: How the celebrations of the Prophet Mohammad’s birthday turned riotous, incited by communal leaders in and out of Singapore, and made worse by the inflammatory reporting of the vernacular press. Such a portrayal of the faultlines of race and religion, while realistic, runs the risk of diversity becoming misconceived as immutable differences that can only divide. The refrain and ritual remembering of ethno-violence may leave the subtle impression of conflict as an inevitability of our diversity and differences. It also portrays ethnic harmony, rather than ethnic discord and violence, as an oddity that requires explanation and justification. Without our young people having a sufficient appreciation and deeper understanding of our society’s heterogeneity, diversity may be unwittingly perceived as something to be feared. This is not to deny that race, language and religion are real fault-lines — but too often, we do not embrace enough our diversity. Instead, we resort to convenient stereotypes and lazy assumptions to make sense of matters concerning race and religion. |
||||
Useful To Me Not Useful To Me | |||||
pharoah88
Supreme |
09-Sep-2010 21:13
|
||||
x 0
x 0 Alert Admin |
The roots of America’s white anxiety Study shows eight top US colleges, varsities discriminate against rural, lower-class whites ROSS DOUT HAT In March this year, Mr Pat Buchanan came to speak at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. While the assembled Ivy Leaguers accused him of homophobia and racism and anti-Semitism, he accused Harvard — and by extension, the entire American elite — of discriminating against white Christians.
Right-wing? You’re out But cultural biases seem to be at work as well. Mr Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: While most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organisations like high school ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances.
Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America”.
This provides statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most under represented groups on elite campuses often are not racial minorities. They are working- class whites (and white Christians, in particular) from conservative states and regions. Inevitably, the same under-representation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: In law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.
This breeds paranoia, among elite and non-elites alike. Among the white working class, increasingly the most reliable Republican constituency, alienation from the American meritocracy fuels the kind of racially-tinged conspiracy theories that Mr Beck and others have exploited — that Mr Obama is a foreign-born Marxist handpicked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with Third World immigrants, and so forth.
Among the highly-educated and liberal, meanwhile, the lack of contact with rural, working-class America generates all sorts of wild anxieties about what is being plotted in the heartland. In the George Bush years, liberals fretted about a looming evangelical theocracy. In the age of the Tea Parties, they see crypto-Klansmen and budding Timothy McVeighs everywhere they look.
This cultural divide has been widening for years, and bridging it is beyond any institution’s power. But it’s a problem admissions officers at top-tier colleges might want to keep in mind when they are assembling their freshman classes.
If such universities are trying to create an elite as diverse as the nation it inhabits, they should remember that there is more to diversity than skin colour — and that both their school and their country might be better off if they admitted a few more ROTC cadets, and a few more aspiring farmers. The New York Times The writer is an Op-Ed columnist with the New York Times and the author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class. A decade later, the note of white grievance that Mr Buchanan, the Reform Party’s presidential nominee in 2000, struck that night is part of the conservative melody. You can hear it when Mr Glenn Beck accuses President Barack Obama of racism, or when Mr Rush Limbaugh casts liberal policies as an exercise in “reparations”. It was sounded last year during the backlash against Ms Sonia Sotomayor’s suggestion that a “wise Latina” jurist might have advantages over a white male judge and again last week when conservatives attacked the Justice Department for supposedly going easy on members of the New Black Panther Party accused of voter intimidation. To liberals, these grievances seem at once noxious and ridiculous. (Is there any group with less to complain about, they often wonder, than white Christian Americans?) But to understand the country’s present polarisation, it is worth recognising what Mr Buchanan got right. Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Mr Thomas Espenshade and Ms Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favour black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Mr Russell K Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative website Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: The downscale, the rural and the working-class. This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower class white with similar qualifications. This may be a money-saving tactic. In a footnote, Mr Espenshade and Ms Radford suggest that these institutions, conscious of their mandate to be multi-ethnic, may reserve their financial aid dollars “for students who will help them look good on their numbers of minority students”, leaving little room to admit financiallystrapped whites. |
||||
Useful To Me Not Useful To Me | |||||
pharoah88
Supreme |
09-Sep-2010 20:59
|
||||
x 0
x 0 Alert Admin |
China cheat sheet helps investors survive Ben Simpfendorfer Ten years ago, China barely registered on global financial markets. Today, it is front and centre. Yet, the market’s understanding of the world’s second-largest economy has struggled to catch up. It is big, foreign and suffers from a serious lack of economic data, meaning speculation can be as important as fact.BLOOMBERG
Ben Simpfendorfer is the chief China economist at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc in Hong Kong and the author of The New Silk Road. The opinions expressed are his own. So here are five simple points that go a long way to understanding one of the world’s most complex places: First, China doesn’t publish gross domestic product data in the same way as other countries. It publishes a growth rate but no quarterly breakdown of real demand. This is a problem. National accounts data is an economist’s most important tool. It shows how much consumers have spent on food or companies have spent building factories. It is the breakdown that helps us understand if the composition of growth is healthy or reliant on only a few sources of demand. In the case of China, there is a risk the country is spending too much on building highways and factories, resulting in overcapacity and bad debts. And since there is no reliable quarterly data on such investment spending, it is hard to understand whether last year’s rocket-fuelled recovery has only worsened imbalances. So when third-quarter growth figures are released early next month, it’s worth attaching a health warning to the report. Second, food almost always explains surprise changes in the consumer price index. Part of the problem is that the average Chinese household is more likely to purchase fresh food to be cooked at home. By contrast, in neighbouring Hong Kong, food eaten in restaurants accounts for half of the food sub-index, so labour and rental costs help to damp the impact of a sudden increase in the prices of fresh food. Not so in China, where the prices of fresh pork alone, for instance, can visibly shift the CPI. The upshot is that the country’s weather patterns, rather than its economic cycle, are arguably more important in forecasting the CPI. Third, China’s domestic demand provides less support to the global economy than popularly believed. Its imports have surged in the past decade but it’s important to understand what exactly it is buying. About a third of imports are destined for the re-export trade. Chinese factories buy semi-conductors and mother boards from producers in Singapore and Taiwan, for instance, assembling them into notebook personal computers and then shipping the finished goods to retail shops in the United States and Europe. Almost another third is commodities. China accounts for much of the world’s demand for many raw materials and is the main buyer of iron ore. Its commodity imports benefit countries such as Australia, Brazil, Chile and South Africa, even as this trade inflates prices for other importers. The final third is made up of goods such as turbines from Germany, excavators from Japan and aircraft from the US. These are the real drivers of global growth. Yet, such imports were valued at only US$430 billion ($580 billion) last year. To put that into perspective, South Korea’s imports were worth US$320 billion in the same year. Fourth, China is big but poor. Its per capita GDP is US$6,600, as measured by purchasing power parity. Yet, this still ranks China alongside Algeria and Namibia in terms of wealth. Moreover, much of the country’s growth has so far benefited companies, rather than households. That’s one of the downsides of a low-cost business model. It’s no surprise then that the government is now aggressively trying to address these imbalances, by lifting minimum wages and improving working conditions. The focus on raising wages and preventing job losses is one reason China has yet to revalue its currency, as critics have demanded, and why it is likely to resist such calls in the future. Fifth, structural growth drivers are as important as cyclical ones. The liberalisation of China’s housing industry in 1998, for instance, explains much of the country’s surging growth. Until then, the state provided most of the housing stock. But reforms allowed households to buy bigger and better homes, and property developers built them. It might be that the structural drivers are now being overwhelmed by cyclical ones and that China is experiencing a housing bubble no different from those of the United Kingdom and US. If so, the bears will soon be proven right as the bubble bursts and China’s decade-long boom will be brought to a screeching halt. But if the bears are proven wrong, it will be because of the emergence of new structural drivers. Urbanisation is one such driver. Some analysts say China’s urban population will grow by 15 million people annually over the next 10 years, implying an extra 5 million apartments annually. Services are another. China’s manufacturing is still the largest driver of growth but there are the early signs of an emerging services sector, from car rental to cinema multiplexes. These five points are by no way exhaustive. But China is unusual compared with many of the world’s largest economies, perhaps because of the country’s status as a developing, Asian, or formerly planned economy. The usual set of analytical tools won’t always apply, however tempting it is to do so. |
||||
Useful To Me Not Useful To Me | |||||
|
|||||
pharoah88
Supreme |
09-Sep-2010 20:47
|
||||
x 0
x 0 Alert Admin |
There was hope of some action by Prime Minister Naoto Kan and Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa on economic policy but nothing happened ... Disappointment over token efforts resulted in exactly what Japan didn’t want: An even stronger yen, which has gone from 85.2 to the greenback on Aug 23 to 84.1 on Aug 31. |
||||
Useful To Me Not Useful To Me | |||||
pharoah88
Supreme |
09-Sep-2010 20:44
|
||||
x 0
x 0 Alert Admin |
Crying wolf has its price Will iam Pesek It's the economy that cried wolf.
THE PRICE OF AVERSION Here are three specific things to consider about Japan’s plight. One, the price of Japan’s aversion to change is going up.
After the boom-and-bust 1980s, it should have rid banks of bad loans, deregulated industry, made tax policies more pro-business, raised productivity, and encouraged entrepreneurship. If Japan had done all these things, it would have a much better balanced economy today and the yen’s value wouldn’t matter nearly so much.
Instead, Japan opted for Band-Aids like massive government spending, low interest rates and a weaker yen.
Exchange rates became a particular obsession in the 2000s as Japan focused on its export behemoths to maintain a trade surplus, the only strategy the government knew how to pursue. To their great surprise, Japanese policymakers discovered that the currencies of nations that export more than they import go up — especially in crisis-wracked times, when investors seek safety.
Now, thanks to the glacial pace of change, Japan’s relevance globally is waning.
China’s economy officially surpassed Japan’s in size in August.
The moral of this story? “Don’t cry about the strong yen; fix the problem,” says Ms Naomi Fink, strategist at Bank of Tokyo — Mitsubishi UFJ in Tokyo. OVERWHELMED BY GLOBAL FORCES Second, Japan is being overwhelmed by international forces.
At play are global trends far beyond the reach of bureaucrats in Tokyo.
Yet its post-war business model worked so brilliantly that the corporate elite, even to this day, is reluctant to change.
Ditto for a government that remains wary of immigration and empowering women to offset a rapidly ageing workforce.
This delicately calibrated status quo is getting harder to maintain with each passing day. Trade surplus aside, there’s little economic justification for the yen’s 28 per cent jump against the dollar since Sept 1, 2008.
Japan didn’t fix its leaky roofs when the sun was shining prior to the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers.
Now that the world economy is raining bad news, it’s paying the price. So are the nation’s 126 million people and investors who bought into a revival that was more hype than reality. POLITICAL PARALYSIS The third point is that political paralysis is taking its toll.
There’s a reason currency traders aren’t living in fear that the Bank of Japan will sell yen: The nation’s policy-making apparatus is more uncoordinated than ever.
Part of the problem is that Japan can’t seem to hang on to a leader: Should a Sept 14 election go badly for Mr Kan, Japan could have its sixth prime minister in three years.
“Twenty years after the bursting of the bubble, it would be nice if we had, if not a plan, at least a sense of urgency,” says Mr Nicholas Smith, director of equity research at MF Global FXA Securities in Tokyo.
“And a leader that stayed long enough for the outside world to learn his name.”
This leadership vacuum feeds deflation.
In July, consumer prices excluding fresh food fell for a 17th consecutive month.
The smartest way to persuade consumers to save less and spend more is to convince them the future is bright. That goes for businesses, too.
Such optimism is in short supply.
Mr Suzuki, for one, is speaking out with greater frequency — and greater pessimism — these days.
“I want Tokyo to hear our wailing,” he says. Oh, policymakers do. It’s just that they have been doing their own fair share of crying — even as the world passes Japan by. William Pesek is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. With growth slowing, deflation deepening and the yen inexplicably surging in late August, Japanese policymakers pledged bold action. Bank of Japan Governor Masaaki Shirakawa rushed home to deal with the emergency. Investors braced for aggressive currency intervention. The media mobilised on Aug 30 to cover Prime Minister Naoto Kan unveiling a fat stimulus package to counter the export-crimping effects of a strong yen. And then — nothing. Disappointment over token efforts resulted in exactly what Japan didn’t want: An even stronger yen, which has gone from 85.2 to the greenback on Aug 23 to 84.1 on Aug 31. Suzuki Motor chairman Osamu Suzuki, who has built a big export business for his company’s sturdy little cars, speaks for many when he says of the currency: “I spend every day feeling anxious about this.” So do politicians in Tokyo. That they are at a loss to do anything about it has Japan suffering the same fate as Aesop’s boy who warned of crisis so often that no one took him seriously anymore. As the dollar and euro slide, the yen rises by default. Rarely before has it been so difficult for Japan to control its currency — yet the yen is the national problem that policy makers, Japanese executives and ordinary Japanese obsess about the most. The yen’s jump to a 15-year high says much about where Japan finds itself in 2010 and that’s not a good place. |
||||
Useful To Me Not Useful To Me | |||||
pharoah88
Supreme |
09-Sep-2010 19:34
|
||||
x 0
x 0 Alert Admin |
Has the US economy stalled? With the pall cast over Q2 and Q3’s slow growth, it may not take much to tip the economy into a double dip Keith Wade FEARS of a double dip remain high with the Federal Reserve downgrading its assessment of the United States economy this month. Interest rate expectations have fallen again with US Treasury yields falling sharply and the curve experiencing a bull flattening. Lower rates and flatter curves are normally associated with weaker growth, but equity markets continue to ignore the message from the bond market. Instead, risk assets have rallied over the past month with equities, credit and commodities performing strongly. Furthermore, performance within these asset classes has been led by the more cyclical industrial and material sectors, with emerging markets leading the regions. The stand-off between equity and bond investors continues. Our macro view of no double dip suggests that equity investors will eventually win this debate, but the Fed’s assessment and a run of disappointing figures (including another weak payroll) mean that the pendulum has swung in favour of the “double dippers” once more this month. We gave our reasons for not expecting a double dip last month, as we see the economy being supported by increased corporate spending. Strong profit growth and healthy cash flows indicate that firms will raise capital expenditures and employment in the coming months. Meanwhile, although still fragile, the household sector has already been through a considerable period of retrenchment, raising its savings ratio to the highest level for more than a decade in the US and United Kingdom. THE MID-YEAR SOFT PATCH More recently, the gloom has been increased by the news that the US economy was even weaker than previously expected in Q2. Economists now expect growth during Q2 to be revised down to 1.5 per cent annualised from an original estimate 2.4 per cent. Although this may sound like ancient history, it adds to the perception that the US economy has stalled and is vulnerable to the slightest shock which might reduce demand. So far, the third quarter is not looking any better and with growth at such a minimal level, it would not take much to tip us into the double dip. LOOKING BACK Periods where a recovery has appeared to stall are not uncommon. Looking at the last two US recoveries, in the early 90s and 2000s, both saw GDP growth drop below 2.5 per cent annualised after the recession had ended. Both were periods where the outlook was seen as “uncertain” by the Fed. In each case the Fed eased, bond yields fell and the economy bounced back. This illustrates how even a normal recovery can be vulnerable to bouts of weakness once the inventory cycle has run its course. The current recovery is all the more likely to suffer, given the de-leveraging headwinds on activity. It also highlights a key difference today: Monetary policy was effective in supporting the recovery in the early 90s and 2000s, whereas today there are doubts about its potency given the de-leveraging of balance sheets. That does not mean that the Fed will not try to do something. Although we do not expect an outright double dip, growth could well be slow enough to prompt a reaction and we would not rule out further quantitative easing (QE) in the US in the coming months. We do not believe that it would have much effect on the economy, but the Fed will want to be seen to be responding. The impact on the financial markets could be quite powerful, however. In addition to QE, we would also watch for the announcement of further stimulus from the administration ahead of the mid-term elections in November. LOOKING AHEAD Next month, we will review our forecasts for global growth and inflation. At this stage it is likely that we will have to trim our US GDP forecasts to reflect the weaker performance of the economy around mid-year. However, forecasts for Europe are likely to be less affected given the recent improvement in indicators. Interest rate rises are likely to be delayed until late next year. The writer is Chief Economist and Strategist at Schroders. |
||||
Useful To Me Not Useful To Me | |||||
pharoah88
Supreme |
08-Sep-2010 18:11
|
||||
x 0
x 0 Alert Admin |
Obama unveils S$67.4b job plan MILWAUKEE White House officials said the package would run over six years but would be “front-loaded” so that it would jump-start the economy by putting building workers and other manual labourers back to work. Republican leaders instantly assailed the proposal as an ineffective one that would simply raise already excessive federal spending. Mr Obama, however, said the Republicans were hoping Americans would forget that the economic policies they put in place had led to the recession and that they had opposed nearly everything he has done to help the economy. The speech, made on the Labour Day holiday that honours American workers, is an indication that Mr Obama intends to focus his efforts almost exclusively on the economy until the Nov 2 elections. Critics — including several from his own Democratic Party — have accused Mr Obama of having dispersed his energies too widely on health care and foreign policy instead of concentrating on voters’ fears about their livelihoods. Mr Obama was to announce further job-creating schemes yesterday, including a plan to extend tax incentives for research. — United States President Barack Obama rolled out a job programme on Monday that would exceed US$50 billion ($67.4 billion) to rebuild roads, railways and runways as the countdown began to the November congressional elections, in which the Democrats are expected to receive a drubbing.Agencies |
||||
Useful To Me Not Useful To Me | |||||
|
|||||
pharoah88
Supreme |
08-Sep-2010 16:34
|
||||
x 0
x 0 Alert Admin |
Middle-class struggle to afford homes in KL
KUALA LUMPUR
One condominium he was eyeing has gone from RM250,000 ($107,860) for a renovated unit at the end of last year to RM330,000 for a standard unit — a jump of 32 per cent in less than a year. “It’s unaffordable,” he said.
Many middle-class home hunters like him are becoming frustrated by prices that are far outpacing income growth.
Figures provided by the National Property Information Centre show that the average values of residential properties in Kuala Lumpur rose 34 per cent to RM485,435 in the first half of the year from RM362,569 in the same period last year — nine times the average urban household income of RM54,000.
Housing and Local Government Minister Chor Chee Heung said the government is building about 76,000 lowcost homes nationwide over the next three years but it is unable to tell private developers how much to build to boost supply of middle-class housing.
“Those who cannot afford it will just have to move to houses further away from the city, where it is cheaper,” he said.
Real Estate and Housing Developers Association president Michael Yam said the rising prices were partly due to an imbalance of supply and demand as more migrants move to land-scarce Kuala Lumpur.
But one developer expressed concern that the market had become too speculative, with investors pouring money into property in the hope that prices will keep spiralling upwards.
There are signs that the government is concerned that a real estate bubble is forming. The Edge
Such a move, however, may hurt first-time home buyers who would have to struggle to come up with the downpayment. |
||||
Useful To Me Not Useful To Me | |||||
pharoah88
Supreme |
08-Sep-2010 16:29
|
||||
x 0
x 0 Alert Admin |
Over half of all young Japanese need second income Some take on second, third jobs to cope with living expenses OSAKA She might go home and promote products and stores on her blog. Or, in another role as a work-life coach, she might meet a client for a consultation. Ms Yokogawa, 32, makes about one-third of her income from her side jobs, which take up an average of three hours a day on weekdays and as many as five hours a day on weekends. “It’s not that I hate my main job but I want to have a stable income without being completely dependent on the company,” she said. For decades, the standard career path in Japan was to graduate from college, join a company and to stay there until retirement — one job for life. But with salaries down more than 12 per cent over the last decade amid an uncertain labour market, young Japanese are increasingly making ends meet by holding second or even third jobs. A survey in January by the Internet market research company, Ishare, found that almost 17 per cent of workers aged 20 to 50 had a side job. And data released last week by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare found that almost 56 per cent of workers aged 15 to 34 needed another form of income to help pay living expenses. “The biggest cause of the increase is young people trying to increase their short-term earnings in the face of severe economic and income conditions,” said Mr Toshihiro Nagahama, chief economist at the Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute in Tokyo. “But it’s also a form of risk management for workers fearful of losing their main jobs.” The unemployment rate in Japan was 5.2 per cent in July. While that is low by international standards, it is close to a record high for the country. The economy remains stagnant, weighed down by an aging and shrinking population, deflation [due tO ZERO Bank Deposit Interest Rate] and a strong yen which crimps exports. — From nine to five, Ms Hiroko Yokogawa toils at a small architectural design firm, doing clerical work and managing accounts. But even when her shift is over, her day’s work is nowhere near done.The New York Times |
||||
Useful To Me Not Useful To Me | |||||
Hulumas
Supreme |
07-Sep-2010 16:22
Yells: "INVEST but not TRADE please!" |
||||
x 0
x 0 Alert Admin |
Second financial stimulus package just too late and too low ! I am afraid, third successive financial stimulus package is imminent too !
|
||||
Useful To Me Not Useful To Me | |||||
Hulumas
Supreme |
07-Sep-2010 16:14
Yells: "INVEST but not TRADE please!" |
||||
x 0
x 0 Alert Admin |
The problem is it just can't be easily transformed within years but several decades! Will it be successful without any global economical disorder . . . . . . . . . . . . . ? | ||||
Useful To Me Not Useful To Me | |||||
pharoah88
Supreme |
07-Sep-2010 16:07
|
||||
x 0
x 0 Alert Admin |
1938 in 2010 Obama’s economists are repeating the mistakes of the past by pulling back financial stimulus too soon Paul Krugman Here’s the situation: The United States economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The President’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high.see anything like the miracle of the 1940s happening again.
THE NEW YORK TIMES The writer is a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2008. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the mid-term elections. The President in question is Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the year is 1938. Within a few years, of course, the Great Depression was over. But it’s both instructive and discouraging to look at the state of America circa 1938 — instructive because the nature of the recovery that followed refutes the arguments dominating today’s public debate, discouraging because it’s hard to Now, we weren’t supposed to find ourselves replaying the late 1930s. President Barack Obama’s economists promised not to repeat the mistakes of 1937, when FDR pulled back fiscal stimulus too soon. But by making his programme too small and too short-lived, Mr Obama did just that: The stimulus raised growth while it lasted, but it made only a small dent in unemployment — and now it’s fading out. And just as some of us feared, the inadequacy of the administration’s initial economic plan has landed it — and the nation — in a political trap. More stimulus is desperately needed, but in the public’s eyes the failure of the initial programme to deliver a convincing recovery has discredited government action to create jobs. In short, welcome to 1938. The story of 1937, of FDR’s disastrous decision to heed those who said that it was time to slash the deficit, is well-known. What’s less well-known is the extent to which the public drew the wrong conclusions from the recession that followed: Far from calling for a resumption of New Deal programmes, voters lost faith in fiscal expansion. Consider Gallup polling from March 1938. Asked whether government spending should be increased to fight the slump, 63 per cent of those polled said “no”. Asked whether it would be better to increase spending or to cut business taxes, only 15 per cent favoured spending; 63 per cent favoured tax cuts. And the 1938 election was a disaster for the Democrats, who lost 70 seats in the House and seven in the Senate. Then came the war. From an economic point of view World War II was, above all, a burst of deficit financed government spending, on a scale that would never have been approved otherwise. Over the course of the war the federal government borrowed an amount equal to roughly twice the value of GDP in 1940 — the equivalent of roughly US$30 trillion ($40.3 trillion) today. Had anyone proposed spending even a fraction of that much before the war, people would have said the same things they’re saying today. They would have warned about crushing debt and runaway inflation. They would also have said, rightly, that the Depression was in large part caused by excess debt — and then have declared that it was impossible to fix this problem by issuing even more debt. But guess what? Deficit spending created an economic boom — and the boom laid the foundation for long-run prosperity. Overall debt in the economy — public plus private — actually fell as a percentage of gross domestic product, thanks to economic growth and, yes, some inflation, which reduced the real value of outstanding debts. And after the war, thanks to the improved financial position of the private sector, the economy was able to thrive without continuing deficits. The economic moral is clear: When the economy is deeply depressed, the usual rules don’t apply. Austerity is self-defeating: When everyone tries to pay down debt at the same time, the result is depression and deflation, and debt problems grow even worse. And, conversely, it is possible — indeed, necessary — for the nation as a whole to spend its way out of debt: A temporary surge of deficit spending, on a sufficient scale, can cure problems brought on by past excesses. But the story of 1938 also shows how hard it is to apply these insights. Even under FDR, there was never the political will to do what was needed to end the Great Depression; its eventual resolution came essentially by accident. I had hoped that we would do better this time. But it turns out that politicians and economists alike have spent decades unlearning the lessons of the 1930s, and are determined to repeat all the old mistakes. And it’s slightly sickening to realise that the big winners in the midterm elections are likely to be the very people who first got us into this mess, then did everything in their power to block action to get us out. But always remember: This slump can be cured. All it will take is a little bit of intellectual clarity, and a lot of political will. Here’s hoping we find those virtues in the not too distant future. |
||||
Useful To Me Not Useful To Me | |||||
pharoah88
Supreme |
07-Sep-2010 15:56
|
||||
x 0
x 0 Alert Admin |
Superbroke, Superfrugal, Superpower?
In recent years, I have often said to European friends: So, you didn’t like a world of too much American power?not going to look to save money on foreign policy and foreign wars.
The Frugal Superpower: America’s Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era
“In 2008,” Mr Mandelbaum notes, “all forms of government-supplied pensions and health care (including Medicaid) constituted about 4 per cent of total American output.”
At present rates, and with the baby boomers soon starting to draw on Social Security and Medicare, by 2050 “they will account for a full 18 per cent of everything the United States produces”.
This — in addition to all the costs of bailing ourselves out of this recession — “will fundamentally transform the public life of the United States and therefore the country’s foreign policy”. EVERYONE WILL FEEL IT For the past seven decades, in both foreign affairs and domestic policy, our defining watchword was “more”, argues Mr Mandelbaum.
“The defining fact of foreign policy in the second decade of the 21st century and beyond will be ‘less’”.
When the world’s only superpower gets weighed down with this much debt — to itself and other nations — everyone will feel it.
How? Hard to predict.
But all I know is that the most unique and important feature of US foreign policy over the last century has been the degree to which America’s diplomats and naval, air and ground forces provided global public goods — from open seas to open trade and from containment to counter terrorism — that benefited many others besides us.
US power has been the key force maintaining global stability, and providing global governance, for the last 70 years.
That role will not disappear, but it will almost certainly shrink.
Great powers have retrenched before: Britain for instance.
But, as Mr Mandelbaum notes: “When Britain could no longer provide global governance, the United States stepped in to replace it. No country now stands ready to replace the United States, so the loss to international peace and prosperity has the potential to be greater as America pulls back than when Britain did”.
After all, Europe is rich but wimpy.
China is rich nationally but still dirt poor on a per capita basis and, therefore, will be compelled to remain focused inwardly and regionally.
Russia, drunk on oil, can cause trouble but not project power.
“Therefore, the world will be a more disorderly and dangerous place,” Mr Mandelbaum predicts.
How to mitigate this trend?
Mr Mandelbaum argues for three things:
First, we need to get ourselves back on a sustainable path to economic growth and re-industrialisation, with whatever sacrifices, hard work and political consensus that requires.
Second, we need to set priorities. We have enjoyed a century in which we could have, in foreign policy terms, both what is vital and what is desirable. For instance, I presume that with infinite men and money we can succeed in Afghanistan.
But is it vital? I am sure it is desirable, but vital?
Finally, we need to shore up our balance sheet and weaken that of our enemies, and the best way to do that in one move is with a much higher gasoline tax.
America is about to learn a very hard lesson: You can borrow your way to prosperity over the short run but not to geopolitical power over the long run.
That requires a real and growing economic engine. And, for us, the short run is now over.
There was a time when thinking seriously about American foreign policy did not require thinking seriously about economic policy.
That time is also over. An America in hock will have no hawks — or at least none that anyone will take seriously. THE NEW YORK TIMES The writer has won the Pulitzer Prize three times, most recently in 2002 for commentary. See how you like a world of too little American power — because it is coming to a geopolitical theatre near you. Yes, America has gone from being the supreme victor of World War II, with guns and butter for all, to one of two superpowers during the Cold War, to the indispensable nation after winning the Cold War, to “The Frugal Superpower” of today. Get used to it. That’s our new nickname. American pacifists need not worry any more about “wars of choice”. We are not doing that again. We cannot afford to invade Grenada today. Ever since the onset of the Great Recession of 2008, it has been clear that the nature of being a leader — political or corporate — was changing in America. During most of the post-World War II era, being a leader meant, on balance, giving things away to people. Today, and for the next decade at least, being a leader in America will mean, on balance, taking things away from people. And there is simply no way that America’s leaders, as they have to take more things away from their own voters, are Foreign and defence policy is a lagging indicator. A lot of other things get cut first. But the cuts are coming — you can already hear the warnings from Secretary of Defence Robert Gates. And a frugal United States superpower is sure to have ripple effects around the globe. |
||||
Useful To Me Not Useful To Me | |||||
niuyear
Supreme |
07-Sep-2010 15:35
|
||||
x 0
x 0 Alert Admin |
Yes !! Approved, we can have cocubine if legitimate wife cant give birth to baby boy!!
|
||||
Useful To Me Not Useful To Me | |||||
pharoah88
Supreme |
07-Sep-2010 15:30
|
||||
x 0
x 0 Alert Admin |
The roots of America’s white anxiety Study shows eight top US colleges, varsities discriminate against rural, lower-class whites ROSS DOUT HAT In March this year, Mr Pat Buchanan came to speak at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. While the assembled Ivy Leaguers accused him of homophobia and racism and anti-Semitism, he accused Harvard — and by extension, the entire American elite — of discriminating against white Christians.
Right-wing? You’re out But cultural biases seem to be at work aswell. Mr Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: While most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organisations like high school ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances.
Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America”.
This provides statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often are not racial minorities. They are working-class whites (and white Christians, in particular) from conservative states and regions. Inevitably, the same under representation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: In law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.
This breeds paranoia, among elite and non-elites alike. Among the white working class, increasingly the most reliable Republican constituency, alienation from the American meritocracy fuels the kind of racially-tinged conspiracy theories that Mr Beck and others have exploited — that Mr Obama is a foreign-born Marxist handpicked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with Third World immigrants, and so forth.
Among the highly-educated and liberal, meanwhile, the lack of contact with rural, working-class America generates all sorts of wild anxieties about what is being plotted in the heartland. In the George Bush years, liberals fretted about a looming evangelical theocracy. In the age of the Tea Parties, they see crypto-Klansmen and budding Timothy McVeighs everywhere they look.
This cultural divide has been widening for years, and bridging it is beyond any institution’s power. But it’s a problem admissions officers at top-tier colleges might want to keep in mind when they are assembling their freshman classes.
If such universities are trying to create an elite as diverse as the nation it inhabits, they should remember that there is more to diversity than skin colour — and that both their school and their country might be better off if they admitted a few more ROTC cadets, and a few more aspiring farmers. The New York Times The writer is an Op-Ed columnist with the New York Times and the author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class. A decade later, the note of white grievance that Mr Buchanan, the Reform Party’s presidential nominee in 2000, struck that night is part of the conservative melody. You can hear it when Mr Glenn Beck accuses President Barack Obama of racism, or when Mr Rush Limbaugh casts liberal policies as an exercise in “reparations”. It was sounded last year during the backlash against Ms Sonia Sotomayor’s suggestion that a “wise Latina” jurist might have advantages over a white male judge and again last week when conservatives attacked the Justice Department for supposedly going easy on members of the New Black Panther Party accused of voter intimidation. To liberals, these grievances seem at once noxious and ridiculous. (Is there any group with less to complain about, they often wonder, than white Christian Americans?) But to understand the country’s present polarisation, it is worth recognising what Mr Buchanan got right. Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Mr Thomas Espenshade and Ms Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favour black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Mr Russell K Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative website Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: The downscale, the rural and the working-class. This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lowerclass white with similar qualifications. This may be a money-saving tactic. In a footnote, Mr Espenshade and Ms Radford suggest that these institutions, conscious of their mandate to be multi-ethnic, may reserve their financial aid dollars “for students who will help them look good on their numbers of minority students”, leaving little room to admit financiallystrapped whites. |
||||
Useful To Me Not Useful To Me |